Urdu marsiay and nohay, or elegies, have not only rendered to
the Urdu language literary and poetic beauty, but also a medium of religious,
cultural, and intellectual expression. Although some Urdu marsiay and nohay deal
with topics other than the seventh-century battle of Karbala, most of them have
focused on the events that paved the path to this battle and the agonizing
aftermath of this event.

In order to comprehend Urdu marsiay and nohay, it is essential to glance
briefly at the historical and social milieu that nourished this genre. The
tradition of marsiya has its roots in the pre-Islamic Arab and Persian worlds,
where human sentiments and pathos were expressed in form of elegiac poetry. This
tradition continued after the advent of Islam, with many companions of the
Prophet Muhammad, such as Umar, arranging for elegies to be written about their
deceased family members. In 680 C.E., on the bank of the river Euphrates,
Hussain, a grandson of Muhammad, along with his seventy-one companions, was
killed in a deserted place, Karbala, for refusing to pay allegiance to the
Umayyad ruler, Yazid. This event became a major theme for the marsia's and
noha's of the ensuing centuries. As history indicates the first noha was recited
by Imam Hussain's sister, Janab-e-Zainab, and son, Imam Zain-al-Abedin, in the
aftermath of Imam Hussain's martyrdom. There were, however, severe restrictions
imposed on such mourning ceremonies since the Umayyad rulers could not afford to
foster empathy for the family of the Prophet.

When Shia'ism became the official religion of Iran in the fifteenth century,
Safavid rulers such as Shah Tahmasp, patronized poets who wrote about the
tragedy of Karbala, and the genre of marsiya, according to Persian scholar
Wheeler Thackston, "was particularly cultivated by the Safavids." The most
well-known fifteenth-century Persian marsiya writer was Muhtasham Kashani (d.
1587), whose works consequently became a source of elegy emulation for Iranians
as well as Indian poets of ensuing generations.

Persian and Arabic languages and literatures had a momentous influence on
Indo-Muslim culture in general and on the evolution of Urdu language and
literature in particular. The Adil Shahi and Qutb Shahi dynasties of South India
(Deccan), predominantly Shia'is in religious persuasion, patronized
Dakhni (an early South Indian dialect of Urdu) marsiay and nohay. Although
Persian marsiay and nohay of Muhtasham Kashani were still recited, the Adil
Shahi and Qutb Shahi rulers felt the need to render the Karbala tragedy in the
language of common Muslims. In the Adil Shahi and Qutb Shahi kingdom of Deccan,
marsiay and nohay flourished, especially under the patronage of Ali Adil Shah
and Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, marsiya writers themselves, and poets such as
Ashraf Biyabani. Urdu marsiay and nohay written during this period are still
popular in South Indian villages.

The Yaqub-Yusuf motif, which by no means is restricted to marsiya, recurs
over and over in this genre since the son of Imam Hussain, Ali Akbar, was
supposedly as handsome as the Qu'ranic Yusuf, and since the Imam's distress
after the martyrdom of his son was analogous to Yaqub's sorrow after his son
parted from him. The North Indian marsiya writers used similar motifs and
metaphors when the centre of Urdu literature moved to the North after the
kingdoms of the Deccan were annexed by the Mughals.

As Mughal power began to wane in the aftermath of the rule of Aurangzeb
(1706), other autonomous Muslim powers sprung up in India. The Nawabs of Avadh,
Shi'is and patrons of Urdu literature and poetry, provided auspices for
the sublimation of the marsiya genre in North India.

Contrary to popular perceptions, Urdu marsiay and nohay are not confined to
the gatherings of Muharram but are recited throughout the year in ceremonies
preceding weddings and death anniversaries. However, in the kingdom of Avadh,
during the months of Muharram and Safar, marsiay and nohay were recited on a
daily basis in the majalis (gatherings to commemorate the tragedy of Karbala)
held twice a day in imambareh (places of gathering for the majalis). The adab
(etiquette) of these majalis was such that the audiences would sit facing the
taziyah (models of the shrines of the martyrs of Karbala), and listen to the
narration of the popularly perceived events of Karbala in Persian; they would
then hear the Urdu marsiya written for that particular day. The recitation of
marsiay and nohay was also considered an art, and the writers were not always
considered the best orators to generate pathos among the audiences. The Navabs
thus invited effective reciters (marsiya khwan and noha khwan) who had a
considerable following themselves. After the recitation of marsiay and nohay,
the family of the Prophet was praised and the enemies of this family rebuked.
The majlis would close with self-flagellation. Keeping this historical and
cultural background of Urdu marsiya tradition in mind, it is apposite to delve
into the salient characteristics of this genre.

The main purpose of Urdu marsiay and nohay is to praise the heroes of Islam,
who fought on the side of Imam Hussain in Karbala, and to induce empathy for the
family of Ali and Fatima. The metaphors utilized in Avadh, Delhi, and the
surrounding vicinity to glorify the accomplishments of early Islamic heroes in
Urdu marsiay and nohay were similar to the metaphors and similes used in qasaid,
or odes, written in praise of Indian rulers. Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) described
the "King of Martyrs," Imam Hussain, by using metaphors, similar to the ones he
used in his odes:

The glory and jewel of faith, Hussain Ibn-e
Ali,
who shall be called the candle of the gathering of grandeur.
The fountain of paradise (Salsabil) is in the path of those,
who call him the thirsty martyr of Karbala.
It is a strange occurrence that an enemy of Islam,
battles with Ali and is considered only to be mistaken.
After Ali there is Hassan, and after Hassan there is Hussain,
How can I exonerate any person who has mistreated them.

Ghalib, in his marsiay and nohay, not only praised the family of Ali, but
expressed loyalty to the family of Muhammad by rebuking their opponents. It is
difficult for Ghalib to comprehend how the enemies of the Prophet's family can
be exonerated by Muslims. Ghalib's criticism could have been aimed at the belief
of many Muslims that the judgment of the companions of the Prophet should be
left to Allah. Ghalib considered Imam Hussain to be the ideal king; the precepts
of loyalty demanded aversion toward any enemy of the king.

While Ghalib used regal imagery to underscore the virtues of Imam Hussain,
Mirza Dabir (1803-1875) described the Imam as also being the paragon of a true
lover. Dabir used ascetic and mystical imagery, commonly implemented in Urdu and
Persian poetry, to describe Imam Hussain. Imam Hussain is depicted as the ideal
lover due to his penchant for suffering in order to attain Allah:

For the sake of thirst, he Hussain fasted
in youth,
For the sake of thirst, he turned away from Zehra's Fatima's milk,
For the sake of thirst, he never accepted the Euphrates' favor,
For the sake of thirst, he abnegated water from the Seventh of Muharram.
The world remembers the story of his slaying,
and his utterance of `thirst, thirst' while biting the tongue.

Dabir interpreted the Imam's thirst as if it were a means to unite the Imam
with Allah. It was as though Allah tested his beloved by depriving him of water
in the sweltering desert of Karbala. But Imam Hussain was not the only one put
to the test of Allah; each and every person on the side of the Imam --from the
six month old child, Ali Asghar, to the seventy-one-year-old companion of the
Prophet Muhammad, Habib Ibn-e Mazahir-- was subjected to the agony of thirst.
The mystical imagery of forbearance was utilized by Dabir to make his view of
the suffering side of the Imam more fathomable to an audience attuned to
mystical poetry.

The marsiay and nohay of Mir Taqi Mir (1722-1810) and Muhammad Rafi Sauda
(1713-1780) are similar to those of Ghalib and Dabir in that they perform their
panegyrical function for the martyrs of Karbala; but these poets also wrote
marsiay and nohay in which the narration of the Karbala tragedy was saturated
with cultural and ceremonial imagery of North India. The North Indian Muslim
cultural terminology used by Mir and Sauda includes sehra--the veil of flowers
that the groom and the bride wear on their wedding day in India and naik--the
demand of the groom's sister for money before allowing her brother to approach
his bride

In addition to the wedding of Karbala, other parts of the Karbala tragedy
were painted with Indian colors. Mir Anis' (1802-1874) description of the women
of the Prophet's household embarking on the journey to Karbala and the protocol
that was followed was quite similar to the protocol followed by the begamat
(ladies) of Lucknow:

Even if there is a young boy on the roof,
he must get down,
If he is coming this way, he must stop.
No stranger should travel on this road,
For God has made her (Zainab, sister of Hussain) nobler than Mary,
Even the male angels have closed their eyes.

This part of Anis' marsiya echoes the rigidity with which purdah (veiling)
was observed in nineteenth-century Avadh.

The marsiay and nohay of Anis were also heavily laced with durbar imagery,
which registered in the mind of the readers and listeners the manner in which
Imam Hussain and his companions must have eagerly awaited their martyrdom:

On the right side of the camp were the
relatives of the Imam,
their glowing faces brightened the dark desert of Karbala.
Like beads in a rosary, they were all united.
They anxiously waited for their death.
They would desire neither food nor water,
their aim was to offer their heads to Allah.
The young boys pleaded to be the first martyrs,
and the older ones left this decision up to the Imam.
In the middle of this assembly was the King of the world,
like the sun amidst the stars.

The foregoing verses create images similar to those associated with the
Mughal durbars, or the Nawabs of Avadh sitting in the Diwan-e-Khas (hall of the
private audience) while being praised by their loyal friends and advisers.

In the marsiay and nohay of Mir Ishq (d. before 1890), the farewell of Imam
Hussain to his friends and family in Medina is also similar to that of a North
Indian king before he commenced on a course of war: crowds gathering to bid
farewell, subjects praying for the master's health, and so on. The farewell of
Imam Hussain's son Ali Akbar, who was eighteen years old during the battle of
Karbala and bore a striking resemblance to his great grandfather, the Prophet
Muhammad, is similar to the farewell any beloved son of Avadh would receive
before he went to war: the family comes to bid him farewell and prays for his
well-being; sisters express their aspirations for his wedding; and mothers give
sadqa (alms that are supposed to remove any curse that might afflict a person)
to the poor.

The marsiay and nohay of Mir Anis reflect the popular prayers of women of
Lucknow. When an unmarried son departs for the battlefront, his mother expresses
her desire to see his sehra; when a brother leaves the house, his sister prays
that the brother's wife always has sandal-wood powder in her hair and children
in her lap; and when a slave joins his master in the war, the slave's wife prays
for her husband's death in exchange for his master's life. The ideals of
brother-sister and mother-son love, fertility of a woman, and loyalty to the
king, were aspirations of the Muslim culture of North India and were channeled
through literary genres like the marsiya.

Images associated with the 1857 uprising against British rule were also
incorporated into marsiay and nohay. As Intezar Hussain states in his study of
Mir Anis' poetry, Urdu marsiay and nohay were shaped by the political situation
of their day. The tumultuous events that afflicted Avadh in the mid-nineteenth
century were juxtaposed with the tragedy of Karbala, generating emotional
catharsis as well as consoling North Indian Muslims by associating their plight
with the travails of Imam Hussain.

Marsiay and nohay would also induce catharsis when families in Avadh lost
their beloved members. Marsiya writers would narrate the family's agony by
comparing it to various events of Karbala. When the Navab of Patna, Sayid Ahmad
Hussain Khan, lost his sixteen-year old son to smallpox, Mir Anis was asked to
write a marsiya in honor of the youth. The marsiya written by Anis opened with a
prayer in which the poet asked Allah to spare parents the grief of their
children:

Oh God, give no parent the sorrow of their
child.
May no inauspicious being be the victim of the scar of their son,
May this wealth, even of the enemy, be preserved,
and may any agony, but this, afflict your people.

By recasting the events of Karbala in local imagery, marsiya writers were
also able to infuse their poetry with intellectual concerns.

In the twentieth century, the number of Muslim socio-religious reformers who
capitalized on the Indianized version of Karbala to channel their concerns for
the society increased. Many twentieth century Urdu marsiay and nohay were given
a solid intellectual dimension by the incorporation of issues--the Khilafat
movement, India's independence, and the plight of the Indian Muslims, and so
on--into the frame story of Karbala. Among the modern marsiya writers who have
appropriated the events surrounding Karbala as the underpinnings of their
socio-religious reform ideology are Josh Malihabadi and Vahid Akhtar. Josh
Malihabadi (1898-1982), renowned as "Shair-i inqilab," or the Poet of
revolution, used the medium of marsiya as a means to propagate the view that
Karbala is not a pathos-laden event of a bygone era, but a prototype for
contemporary revolutionary struggles. Josh's writings during the late 1930's and
the early 1940's, when nationalist feelings were running high in South Asia, had
a momentous impact upon his generation. Josh attempted to galvanize the youth of
his day by intertwining their contemporary struggle of liberation from
colonization with Hussain's battle:

O Josh, call out to the Prince of Karbala
(Hussain),
cast a glance at this twentieth century,
look at this tumult, chaos, and the earthquake.
At this moment there are numerous Yazids, and yesterday there was only one.
From village to village might has assumed the role of truth,
Once again, Human feet are in chains.

By interlacing his marsiay and nohay with metaphors that had nuances of a
revolutionary struggle and depicting the `anti-Muslim' forces as being on a par
with the tyranny of Muawiya and Yazid, Josh gave the impression that the state
of the Muslim community was imminently threatened by a massive,
ideologically-based assault upon everything Islam valued. As far as most Muslims
are concerned, Yazid's rule had been the `Other' of the true Islamic state for
centuries. To identify one's enemy in terms of Yazid was the ultimate
demonization that conjured up the most horrific images of opponents, whether the
opponents were the British colonizers and their indigenous collaborators, or the
corrupt, hypocritical politicians who were about to replace the British
colonizers. Josh is a good example of the colonized intellectual who uses
nostalgic paradigms to enable his audience to conceptualize the potential for an
ideal society. His marsiay and nohay fit into the Fanonian category of
"literature of combat." As Frantz Fanon has pointed out, the strategies of
resistance used by intellectuals like Josh were common in several other
colonized cultures:

There is a tendency to bring conflicts up to date and to modernize the kinds
of struggle which the stories evoke, together with the names of heroes and types
of weapons. The method of allusion is more and more widely used. The formula
`This all happened long ago' is substituted with that of `What we are going to
speak of happened somewhere else, but it might well have happened here today,
and it might happen tomorrow.' Josh, through his marsiay and nohay, reinterprets
Karbala so that it corresponds to his ideals of the future. By explaining
contemporary issues through references to past Islamic heroes, Josh enabled his
audience to conceptualize the potential for a pure Islamic society. The
extensive use of the images of the family of the Prophet was destined to have a
special resonance with readers who had been reared to regard this household as
the apotheosis of virtue. The nobility of thought and action of the heroes of
Karbala is poetically pitched at a level which makes striving for the
characteristics of these early Islamic heroes a contemporary necessity.

Wahid Akhtar, Professor of Philosophy at Aligarh Muslim University, has been
crucial in keeping the tradition of marsiya dynamic in present-day South Asia.
His marsiay and nohay rely on the images, metaphors, and nuances inherited from
nineteenth century masters like Anis and Dabir, and on the values invested in
this genre by socio-religious reformers like Josh. On the back cover of his
recently-published marsiya anthology, for example, is the famous Arabic saying:
"Every place is Karbala; every day is Ashura." By positing a similarity between
Hussein's historic battle and the present day struggle of human kind against
renewed forms of Yazidian oppression, Akhtar deflects the interpretation of the
martyrs of Karbala as mere insignia of Islamic history; they are instead posed
as the sinews for the revival of an ideal Islamic state of being.

The genre of Urdu marsiya is a fitting example of a spiritually-exalted
literary enterprise imported into the subcontinent from the Arab and Persian
world which evolved in conjunction with `Indian culture'. marsiay and nohay
remain important socio-religious texts, permeated by emotional undercurrents, in
the cultural repertoire of South Asia. Through these texts, the events
surrounding the battle of Karbala were emplotted in a myriad of ways congruent
with changing political and cultural milieus. Urdu marsiay and nohay thus
furnish a literary landscape which reflects the underlying social, religious,
and intellectual bonds of South Asian cultures.

The martyrdom of Imam Husain and his companions at Karbala is observed with
solemnity and religious fervour through the Muslim world during Muharram, the
fist month of the Islamic calendar. One of the modes of expressing grief during
this period is the recital of marsiyas by zakirs and professional musicians,
which create cathartic impact on the mourners.
"A marsiya", writes Dr. Muhammad Sadiq in his book A History of Urdu Literature,
"is a lament on the death of a friend, relative, or patron, especially a
nobleman or a king. In Urdu, it is used in the specialized sense of an account
of the tribulations of Imam Husain, and his family and followers, which
culminated in the tragedy of Karbala".

Elegiac and quasi-religious in format and content, it is one of the three most
sought-after genres of medieval Urdu poetry. The other two were the qasida and
the ghazal. The marsiya was given a major boos in its popularity by the
patronage of the Nawabs of Oudh after the fall of Delhi as the principal seat of
Muslim Empire in South Asia.
Whereas a number of classical poets did write marsiyas, the two who took this
form to almost celestial heights, undoubtedly, were Mir Anis and and his rival
Mirza Dabir. With the dissipation of the authority of the Nawabs of Oudh and
their elimination from the political map of India, marsiya also received a jolt.
However, it is still a widely accepted mode of elegiac expressions, conveying
devotional allegiance to the great Imam.

marsiya khwani, or the art of vocalizing poetry, assumed professional dimensions. Accomplished melodists, especially
frontline classical vocalists, developed a style of marsiya recital anticipating
that there would be great demand for it. A majority of them, however, acquired
this skill as a matter of conviction, and also to enhanced its cathartic impact
on their audiences.

In the age of Mir and Sauda, there were obscure practitioners, who
wrote and recited short poems in religious assemblies. They were followed by Mir Khaliq and Mir Zamir, who were first to rehabilitate the form. The great masters
of the form were Mir Babbar Ali Anis (1802-1874) and his rival, Salamat Ali
Dabir, who was born a year after the birth of the former and survived him
exactly by one year".